Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Being an English teacher, I’m always using Buffy episodes to help my students understand what it means to analyze, and to convince them, maybe rather covertly, that Buffy is more than just a girl who kills vampires, and so is the show. An episode I particularly like to use is “I, Robot; You Jane” because of it’s argument, personified in Jenny Calendar and Giles, between technology and free-flowing knowledge and bound information in, as Giles says, “smelly books”. The basic question, in the most Whedonesque of ways, is “should information be smelly? Tangible? And what are the consequences of letting it go free?”

Written and filmed in 1996 as episode eight of the first season, these questions permeated our culture as internet popularity grew, making knowledge accessible to anyone with a computer and internet connection. Twelve years later, these questions still matter, perhaps now more than ever; and Jamison Ryan, the actor who played the character Fritz in the episode, definitely agrees. As we sat down and talked about his experiences working on the show, I was struck by how relevant his experiences and opinions on this new “Big Brother” culture seemed to be, only, in true Buffy fashion, to be prophesied in this episode twelve years earlier. “I thought humanity was innately good until I got on the internet,” Ryan says. “The video killed the radio star, just like MTV in the early ‘80s; there are certain singers no one wants to see glamorized in a video. Now, over 25 years later, the internet has changed the very nature of celebrity. Nothing is sacred anymore. Celebrity has become a punchline.TV can be hypnotizing in the wrong ways but Buffy goes against the grain. Art is one of the highest forms of human communication, a group of artists communicating a thought process to an audience who wants to learn. This cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to forming young, impressionable minds.”